Shortly after the TRON Legacy teaser trailer debuted at the 2008 San Diego Comicon, it turns out that Disney put out the word to game developers, that they wanted to see their pitches for a game based on the upcoming TRON Legacy sequel film.

Which is surprising to me, considering that  at that point  Disney was in the process of expanding their Disney Interactive Studios division considerably, and had started or acquired multiple game studios already. (They've since closed many of those studios, and scaled back their ambitions in a dramatic fashion.)

Nevertheless, Day 1 Studios (now a division of Wargaming, the company that created the game World of Tanks) stepped forward and created a prototype game with the working title of TR2N Liberation. (Since the title for the sequel hadn't been decided yet, at that point in 2008, it was still being referred to as TR2N.)

Footage of the prototype can be seen in the video below. It was clearly in a very early stage, and apparently done in only a few weeks. You could race against an opponent Light Cycle on a track, and later do simple Disc combat against that same opponent. (It's not clear whether the opponent was meant to only be controlled by another player, or could be an AI to create a Single Player experience for both game modes. Though probably the former, due to the lack of time Disney afforded development.)

TR2N Liberation Prototype game footage

After seeing the footage, it seems to me that the recently announced TRON RUN/r game on Steam is going to be very similar in a number of ways, and may have actually borrowed ideas from this unreleased prototype.

Ultimately, Disney decided to give the TRON Legacy video game project to Propaganda Games, and we got TRON Evolution instead. (Very likely because Disney happened to own Propaganda.)

There would have been a certain irony if Day 1 Studios had been the company responsible for a TRON Legacy game. When Monolith Productions was unable to commit to the development of F.E.A.R. 3  another follow-up to their successful F.E.A.R. series of games  Day 1 Studios took over and developed F.E.A.R. 3. History would have repeated itself, if Day 1 Studios had developed the next TRON game after Monolith Productions.

Thanks to mister-julius and inevitablesurrender on tumblr for making me aware of this!

March 21st, 2017 UPDATE: I'm very late to the party, but I wanted to add this additional video that Did You Know Gaming/VGFacts/Unseen64 did on the cancelled TR2N Liberation. Which goes into additional detail about what happened with the project.

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